Tiktok users in the United States will soon see fact checks for crowdfunding appear along with videos on the platform. The app starts rolling out footnotes, its version of community notes, the company.
Tiktok announced its plans to adopt the feature, and since then, nearly 80,000 users have been approved as contributors. Footnotes work similarly to community notes on X. Contributors can add notes to videos with fake claims, AI-generated content, or otherwise require more context. Contributors must cite the source of the information they provide, while other contributors need to rate the footnote as useful before they can be roughly displayed. Like X, Tiktok will use a bridging algorithm to determine which annotations reach a “broad consensus”.
According to screenshots shared by the company, the footnote will be noticeable under the title of the video. Users will be able to read the full comments and view links to their original material.
Although Tiktok is the latest major platform for using crowds to conduct fact checking, the company continues to work with professional fact checking organizations, including the United States. The company also noted that footnotes will have the same content review criteria as the rest of the platforms and that people can report comments that may violate their rules. However, the presence of notes does not affect whether a particular video meets the recommendations in the “For for You” feed.
At present, the company has not made any commitment to launch the system outside the United States. “We chose the U.S. market because it’s big enough that it has a content ecosystem that can support this kind of testing,” Erica Ruzic, head of integrity and authenticity products at Tiktok, said in a press conference. “We will evaluate our pilots’ progress over the next few weeks and months, whether to expand it to other markets.”
The footnote test is at the moment when the company’s future in the United States is still in a difficult position. President Donald Trump has delayed a potential ban since taking office in January because the long-promoted “deal” to create an entity has not yet been implemented. Trump said the agreement could be announced within “two weeks.” Since then, it has also been reported that Tiktok owner bytedance is developing a new application for the application. Tiktok representatives declined to comment on the reports, which suggested such apps could debut in early September.
